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29Lying and DeceitIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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13On the Nature of Faith and Its Relation to Trust and BeliefThe Monist 106 (1): 61-71. 2023.One can have faith in someone, believe in someone and trust someone, and these notions seem closely related. Any account of faith should then address its relation to trust and belief. Like trust, faith can similarly have propositional and relational forms. One can have faith that God is good and faith in God; one can trust that another will do something and trust them to do it. Starting from a comparison between these forms of faith and trust, this paper proposes a philosophical analysis of fait…Read more
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31Losing the rose tinted glasses: neural substrates of unbiased belief updating in depressionFrontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. 2014.
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26What Are We Doing When We Are Training?Sport, Ethics and Philosophy 13 (3-4): 348-362. 2019.ABSTRACTAmateur and professional sportspersons, Bernard Suits proposed, are differentiated by their attitude towards their sport. For the amateur, competition is a game done for its own sake, while...
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29The presumption of assuranceSynthese 199 (3-4): 6391-6406. 2021.According to the Assurance Theory of testimony, in telling an audience something, a speaker offers their assurance that what is told is true, which is something like their guarantee, or promise, of truth. However, speakers also tell lies and say things they do not have the authority to back up. So why does understanding tellings to be a form of assurance explain how tellings can provide a reason for belief? This paper argues that reasons come once it is recognised that tellings are trusted. And …Read more
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467Really Trying or Merely TryingJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 41 (3): 363-380. 2014.We enjoy first-person authority with respect to a certain class of actions: for these actions, we know what we are doing just because we are doing it. This paper first formulates an epistemological principle that captures this authority in terms of trying to act in a way that one has the capacity to act. It then considers a case of effortful action – running a middle distance race – that threatens this principle. And proposes the solution of changing the metaphysics of action: one can keep hold …Read more
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27Collective and extended knowledgePhilosophical Issues 32 (1): 200-213. 2022.Philosophical Issues, EarlyView.
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51Communicating your point of viewEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 661-675. 2021.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 661-675, June 2022.
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41The nature and rationality of conversionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 27 (4): 821-836. 2019.European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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40Indirect Communication, Authority, and Proclamation as a Normative PowerGraduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 40 (1): 147-179. 2019.
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18The Philosophy of Trust (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to philosophical debates on the conditions of its possibility. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these issues. On the practical side, discussions of cooperation address what makes society possible—of how it is that life is not a Hobbesian war …Read more
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51Can we agree to disagree?Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (2): 282-285. 2008.
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101Giving the Benefit of the DoubtInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (2): 139-155. 2018.Faced with evidence that what a person said is false, we can nevertheless trust them and so believe what they say – choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is particularly notable when the person is a friend, or someone we are close to. Towards such persons, we demonstrate a remarkable epistemic partiality. We can trust, and so believe, our friends even when the balance of the evidence suggests that what they tell us is false. And insofar as belief is possible, it is also possible t…Read more
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162On Dreaming and Being Lied ToEpisteme 2 (3): 149-159. 2006.As sources of knowledge, perception and testimony are both vulnerable to sceptical arguments. To both arguments a Moorean response is possible: both can be refuted by reference to particular things known by perception and testimony. However, lies and dreams are different possibilities and they are different in a way that undercuts the plausibility of a Moorean response to a scepticism of testimony. The condition placed on testimonial knowledge cannot be trivially satisfied in the way the Moorean…Read more
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90Collective Testimony and Collective KnowledgeErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5. 2018.Testimony is a source of knowledge. On many occasions, the explanation of one’s knowing that p is that a speaker, S, told one that p. Our testimonial sources—the referents of ‘S’—can be other individuals, and they can be collectives; that is, in addition to learning from individuals, we learn things from committees, commissions, councils, clubs, teams, research groups, departments, administrations, churches, states and other social groups. North Korea might make a declaration about its missile p…Read more
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134Cooperation and trust in conversational exchangesTheoria 23 (1): 23-34. 2008.A conversation is more than a series of disconnected remarks because it is conducted against a background presumption of cooperation. But what makes it reasonable to presume that one is engaged in a conversation? What makes it reasonable to presume cooperation? This paper considers Grice’s two ways of answering this question and argues for the one he discarded. It does so by means of considering a certain problem and analysis of trust.
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367Two-Stage Reliabilism, Virtue Reliabilism, Dualism and the Problem of SufficiencySocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 121-138. 2013.Social epistemology should be truth-centred, argues Goldman. Social epistemology should capture the ‘logic of everyday practices’ and describe socially ‘situated’ reasoning, says Fuller. Starting from Goldman’s vision of epistemology, this paper aims to argue for Fuller’s contention. Social epistemology cannot focus solely on the truth because the truth can be got in lucky ways. The same too could be said for reliability. Adding a second layer of epistemic evaluation helps only insofar as the re…Read more
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251The social character of testimonial knowledgeJournal of Philosophy 97 (11): 581-601. 2000.Through communication, we form beliefs about the world, its history, others and ourselves. A vast proportion of these beliefs we count as knowledge. We seem to possess this knowledge only because it has been communicated. If those justifications that depended on communication were outlawed, all that would remain would be body of illsupported prejudice. The recognition of our ineradicable dependence on testimony for much of what we take ourselves to know has suggested to many that an epistemologi…Read more
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245David Hume's reductionist epistemology of testimonyPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (4). 1998.David Hume advances a reductionist epistemology of testimony: testimonial beliefs are justified on the basis of beliefs formed from other sources. This reduction, however, has been misunderstood. Testimonial beliefs are not justified in a manner identical to ordinary empirical beliefs; it is true, they are justified by observation of the conjunction between testimony and its truth, it is the nature of the conjunctions that has been misunderstood. The observation of these conjunctions provides us…Read more
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51Testimonial KnowledgeActa Analytica 15 (24): 127-138. 2000.The motivation for adopting reductive and anti-reductive theories of testimonial warrant is considered. Whilst both well-motivated neither position can adequately capture the dynamic aspect of the individual knowers relationship to the wider community of knowledge. A hybrid theory of testimony is proposed that attempts to do just this.
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275On Telling and TrustingMind 116 (464): 875-902. 2007.A key debate in the epistemology of testimony concerns when it is reasonable to acquire belief through accepting what a speaker says. This debate has been largely understood as the debate over how much, or little, assessment and monitoring an audience must engage in. When it is understood in this way the debate simply ignores the relationship speaker and audience can have. Interlocutors rarely adopt the detached approach to communication implied by talk of assessment and monitoring. Audiences tr…Read more
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268A genealogy of trustEpisteme 4 (3): 305-321. 2007.In trusting a speaker we adopt a credulous attitude, and this attitude is basic: it cannot be reduced to the belief that the speaker is trustworthy or reliable. However, like this belief, the attitude of trust provides a reason for accepting what a speaker says. Similarly, this reason can be good or bad; it is likewise epistemically evaluable. This paper aims to present these claims and offer a genealogical justification of them
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199Understanding knowledge transmissionRatio 19 (2). 2006.We must allow that knowledge can be transmitted. But to allow this is to allow that an individual can know a proposition despite lacking any evidence for it and reaching belief by an unreliable means. So some explanation is required as to how knowledge rather than belief is transmitted. This paper considers two non-individualistic explanations: one in terms of knowledge existing autonomously, the other in terms of it existing as a property of communities. And it attempts to decide what is at iss…Read more
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74Relativism and our warrant for scientific theoriesInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 12 (3). 2004.We depend upon the community for justified belief in scientific theory. This dependence can suggest that our individual belief in scientific theory is justified because the community believes it to be justified. This idea is at the heart of an anti-realist epistemology according to which there are no facts about justification that transcend a community's judgement thereof. Ultimately, knowledge and justified belief are simply social statuses. When conjoined with the lemma that communities can di…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |